My baby
by PixieXW
Summary: The thoughts going through Snow's brain as she begins to know her daughter.


(A/N) This is a little character monologue I did by Snow, after being reunited with Emma. Just something I put together, hope you enjoy it.

What is a parent? Is it the people who bring you up, or the people who gave you life?  
Does the image of your Father lying half-dead on the floor of your room, blood spurting from his chest, mean anything to the baby girl abandoned on the freeway? Apparently not.  
Do I blame her? No.  
How a person perceives their life can't change in a second, hopes and dreams and personalities were all formed so long ago.  
But not for me.  
I'd never even uttered her name, or fed her, or heard her snuffle in sleep. I wanted her, I loved her but she can't understand that. She can't take in the truth, she doesn't fully believe this is happening.  
I do, I felt so much in a second that it didn't make sense, so much of what I thought was real wasn't and what I thought wasn't was. She stood there, my girl, with Charming's hazel eyes and his soft blonde hair but it curled as it fell; just like mine. But she wasn't my girl, she was a woman, fully grown with a little boy of her very own. Henry, my grandson.  
The need to touch her was worse than having magnets pulling my heart towards my baby. I needed to touch her, to smell her and let her feel everything that I did. I loved her so much more than I thought I could, I needed her much more than she did me.  
It felt so empty and so filling, she was no longer my little girl and she'd never known who I was. The look she gave, trying to be sympathetic, trying to look like she cared and loved just as much as I but I could see she couldn't feel what I did.  
I understood it all, I understood that she had been abandoned on the side of a busy road. I tiny newborn baby girl without a stitch of clothing other than her blanket.  
Emma.  
That was all she knew, she was the naked street child who's parents hadn't even bothered a fingertip for her. It took so long to sink in when all I wanted was the perfect reunion. In Emma's eyes she hadn't been born a princess. She wasn't worth anything to anybody.  
I wanted her to know it all, that she had been born too soon. That if she'd waited only another hour or so we would have been together. Nature had other plans, I didn't. Nature decided to bring on and progress her birth too fast to save us both. Emma didn't know cutting the cord that joined us could have killed either of us without the correct tools or time. She didn't know the agony in every step I took, to feel the agony double in my heart at the sight of her Father bleeding. Together we made a mess of blood on the floor, he didn't wake up, the man I'd fought kings and princesses for. Still I had been elated; she got away. Our baby was safe in my mind, she was safe even if my heart was screaming in agony from the loss. I thought she was safe, I'd never have done it if I had only known.  
She'd told me, well Mary Margaret- I still wasn't able to take in that we were one- about the foster homes. The temper tantrums. The bad school reports. The arguments. The new baby, the excuses piled up, they all let her down and I would have been willing to give Regina my heart if it would take away the pain Emma had felt. I'd have given my life; and Charming's, just to make her life ok.  
"We gave her her best chance," my perfect, charming husband tried to say during the night that followed as we huddled in my apartment. He tried,but I couldn't say what I really felt. He didn't have the same connection, a father could never have the connection a mother did. She had begun and lived and grown inside my body, she and I had shared our very existence for seven months and three weeks. We shared everything from the air I breathed in to the food I ate. We shared seven fifteen am for a few months, when I began to wake up at that time even if her Father believed I was still asleep. I had never lost that bond, I wished I could have done more, proved my love to Emma somehow. I wished I could have explained to her the little mannerisms that she had. The only memories I had were of a very painful labor, trying desperately not to squeeze as every muscle and nerve was telling me to do. Those memories could be fabricated, faked and even with my daughter's 'superpower' she would never believe I told her the honest truth. She was the sheriff, she thrived on hard evidence, not the spoken word.


End file.
